Atic Atac arrived on CRASH’s review desk just as the magazine’s first issue went to press, at the start of 1984, and the reviewers could only manage a quick look. Even that was enough for them to promise “an overall rating well into the 90s”. The game was a haunted castle seen from above, room by room, with a key to find and a ghoulish cast to fight off. It was Ultimate’s first large 48K ZX Spectrum game, released alongside Lunar Jetman at the end of 1983 for £5.50, and it set the pattern for the arcade adventures Ultimate made next.
Trapped in the castle
You start in the great hall. Knights in armour flank the main doors, which carry the letters ACG, for Ashby Computers and Graphics, the company behind Ultimate. The doors have slammed shut, and the only way out is to find the three pieces of a golden key and put them together.
Before starting you choose to be a knight, a wizard or a serf. Each fights with a different thrown weapon, and each knows different secret passages. TV Gamer’s guide worked them out: the wizard can pass through bookcases, the serf through barrels and the knight through grandfather clocks. The castle is spread over five floors, from a sub-basement upwards, linked by staircases and by holes in the floor that drop you one or two floors to land on an alligator rug below.
The rooms are drawn in what TV Gamer called a “chandelier’s eye” view, a splayed perspective from above so that all four walls and the floor are visible. Doors open and slam shut on their own. Barred doors in red, green, blue and yellow open only if you carry the key of the same colour, and you can carry only three things at once.
The chicken
Your energy is shown as a roast chicken in the scroll at the side of the screen. Every monster you touch strips some meat off it, and it wastes away with time, until TV Gamer was left with “merely a fowl skeleton” and a lost life. (Computer & Video Games thought it was a turkey.) The only way to put the meat back is to eat the food lying around the castle: sticks of candy, ice-cream cornets, cans of beans and pumpkins. The monsters include ghosts, spiders, ghouls and pumpkins, with appearances by Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, a devil, a witch and a mummy.
Nobody could agree how big the castle was. CRASH heard an estimate of 40 rooms a floor, 200 in all. TV Gamer went with “151 (or more?)”. One detail everybody liked was that when you lost a life a cross marked the spot for the rest of the game, which CRASH suggested using to map the castle.
Reception
CRASH gave its full review in its second issue, in March 1984, and rated the game 92%. “It’s fast moving, fun to play and its originality, graphics and addictiveness make it excellent value for money,” one reviewer wrote. The complaint was the controls: Ultimate’s Q-W-E-R-T keys were “a handful”. Computer & Video Games thought that, keyboard aside, it “must rate as the best yet from Ultimate”. It was also one of the games that could talk through the Currah Microspeech add-on.
It sold well. In March 1984 it was second in CRASH‘s first readers’ chart, and in May it was second in the W H Smith Spectrum top ten printed by Sinclair User. A BBC Micro version followed in 1986. Looking back at the end of 1984, CRASH wrote that “Ultimate gave us Atic Atac and pointed the way to arcade/adventures”, and that the game “suggested that arcade players didn’t just want mindless zap games”.
What came next
Ultimate’s next Spectrum game, Sabre Wulf (1984), moved the same idea into a jungle maze, and reviewers noticed. CRASH opened its review by admitting that the rumours “that Sabre Wulf would be like Atic Atac are, in many ways, correct”, and CRASH later recalled the magazine criticism that followed: “Sabre Wulf is a copy of Atic Atac”. Knight Lore kept the castle and the hunt for objects but showed the rooms in solid 3D.
Sources
- CRASH, issue 1 (February 1984), p. 28: preview (“an overall rating well into the 90s”); p. 26, the games that talk through the Currah Microspeech.
- CRASH, issue 2 (March 1984): p. 37, full review (£5.50, five floors, the 200-room estimate, the three characters, the crosses, the monsters, the controls); p. 68, the first CRASH Hotline chart.
- CRASH, issue 6 (July 1984), p. 62: Sabre Wulf review.
- CRASH, issue 12 (January 1985), p. 10: Lloyd Mangram’s review of 1984.
- CRASH, issue 51 (April 1988), pp. 35-38: the ACG key, the 92% rating, “Sabre Wulf is a copy of Atic Atac”.
- Computer & Video Games, issue 25 (November 1983), p. 127: Ultimate advertisement with Atic Atac and Lunar Jetman at £5.50.
- Computer & Video Games, issue 28 (February 1984), pp. 31-32: review (the turkey, “the best yet from Ultimate”).
- TV Gamer, June 1984, pp. 29-31: Dave Bishop’s guide (the great hall, the secret passages, the five floors and chutes, the coloured doors, the chicken, the food, the room count).
- Sinclair User, issue 26 (May 1984), p. 15: W H Smith top ten.
- Acorn User, issue 43 (February 1986): review of the BBC Micro version at £7.95.